Author
Topic: Annotated Principia Discordia (Read 6743 times)

The Principia is dense, sometimes confusing, and contains a lot of obscure references. I'd like to examine those things and hold them under a magnifying glass. I'm curious about what sorts of things Mal and Omar were thinking about when they put it together.

Every Thursday, I'll post another section from the 5th ed Principia and share my notes, observations, and other crammings.

A lot of this will be old news to the PD scholars on this forum. But I am already finding some cool stuff that I had never noticed before.

As an example, here's a section from the upcoming entry about the Pentabarf:

Quote

Let's take a look at this line:

after 10 weeks & 11 hours of intensive scrutiny he discerned that the message could be read by standing on his head and viewing it upside down.

These are not just random numbers. There's a joke here if you look for it.

10 weeks and 11 hours is a specific amount of time: 1691 hours.

Notice anything funny about that number?

If you stand on your head and view it upside down, it's still 1691.

Right-side up or upside down, it's the same thing. Mal and Omar are telling us that opposites are balanced, another recurring Discordian theme. Mal-2 already touched on this theme in his Greater Poop interview where he tells us "False things are also true".

The Principia will return to this on page 00009, where there's a Niels Bohr quote: "The opposite of a trivial truth is false; the opposite of a great truth is also true. "

I enjoy pretending I'm a monk studying the bible or something, meditating on some old illuminated manuscript.

I invite you join me in sharing your own observations on each section.

I've been a fan of the Rubiyat for a while. I've got a really nice 50 year old copy on my bedside table. Fitzgerald published four different translations of that verse, and Kerry's version doesn't match any of them.

Quote

Are you going to do the pages in random order or did you start at page 5 because it's sort of the front page minus the introduction?

I actually realized a bit too late that I'm using the page numbers listed on our site rather than the real page numbers.

I started on that page because I didn't want to review the RAW intro, it kind of speaks for itself.

Quote

Special tip/request: can you either tag the posts or put them in a category or something so that you can easily browse them all?

This is a great idea (a trivial thing to say on my part, but that won't stop me). I am surprised that annotations and commentaries along these lines aren't widely available. You can find fifty different versions of one enigmatic little book, and yet there's such hesitance to get into the nitty-gritty details and explore the weirdness of it all. That observation about the "ten weeks eleven days" was great, it's one of those things that's so easy to overlook. That's some good thinking ya got there smartypants. Keep it coming.

Logged

"We can even have a lobby in Washington", Harding was saying, "an organization. NAAIP. Pressure groups. Big billboards along the highway showing a babbling schizophrenic running a wrecking machine, bold, red and green type: 'Hire the Insane.' We've got a rosy future, gentlemen."

When I was in high school, I wrote a commentary on the Tao Te Ching, and it made me really sit down and think about every chapter, every line, to try to squeeze the hell out of it. I was trying to figure out not only what the author may mean, but what it may mean to me and other people. It was a really good exercise.

Logged

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. --Loren Eisley, The Immense Journey

Her Royal Majesty's Chief of Insect Genitalia DissectionGrand Visser of the Six Legged ClassChanticleer of the Holometabola Clade Church, Diptera Parish

So far, I've written enough of these to last through the New Year - frustrating to see them trickle out 1x per week. But that's definitely better than posting like 7 in one day and then a month of silence.